High failure rate in New Westminster math classes: FOI (UPDATED)

New Westminster parents are continuing to press school trustees to investigate what they believe is an exceptionally high failure rate in a high school math class. Now they have new data that they say raises more red flags.

Through freedom-of-information requests, they received five years of math marks for all grades at New Westminster secondary school. Parent Lisa Chao told the New Westminster News Leader that many classes regularly had a 30 to 40 per cent failure rate.

“It’s appalling to me,” she’s quoted as saying. “It’s not about giving superficial good marks. It’s about how to teach them and how to engage them.”

When the parents first filed an FOI request, the school district advised that it would cost $1,400 for the information. But the parents broke one request into several in order to get the information for free.

The data does not identify teachers, nor does it indicate if students do better with some teachers than others. Read the story by the Leader’s Grant Grangerhere.

The New Westminster Record, meanwhile, reports that the school district has spent $73,000 on legal fees so far this school year. In January and February alone, the bill was almost $30,000, says the newspaper, which obtained the information through FOI.

UPDATE: Ann Whiteaker, president of the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils, described the FOI results as alarming. “This is not about one teacher,” she’s quoted as saying in the New Westminster News Leader. “We don’t know that perhaps these kids are missing one section, or there’s a challenge in curriculum. What we do know is when we look at the statistics [the results aren’t satisfactory].”